much higher than originally anticipated’ (Halliday, 1999: 680). In the
years which followed, Western pressure on the USSR, if anything,
increased. The Anglo-American relationship survived the tensions of
the Falklands War and, underpinned by the warm relationship
between British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President
Ronald Reagan, provided a firm basis for opposition to the Soviet
system in general, epitomised in Reagan’s famous description of the
Soviet Union as an empire which was the ‘focus of evil’ in the
world. Two other events contributed to the isolation of the USSR.
One was the imposition of Martial Law in Poland in December
1981, directed at quashing the Solidarity free trade union. The other
was the shooting-down of Korean Airlines flight KE007 on 1
September 1983, after the aircraft had strayed into Soviet airspace.
Each led to the excoriation of the Soviet leadership by the USA. The
détenteof the 1970s, and whatever benefits it had brought the Soviet
Union, was dead.
The rise of Gorbachev and the fall of Karmal
On 10 March 1985, Konstantin Chernenko died of emphysema. He
was immediately succeeded as General Secretary by Mikhail
Gorbachev. The new General Secretary, born in 1931, was the first
occupant of the office to be born after the Bolshevik Revolution,
although he had actually joined the Communist Party in Stalin’s
time. He had spent much of his career as a party official in
Stavropol, and while he became a member of the Central
Committee in 1971, it was only on 27 November 1978 that he
came to Moscow as a Central Committee Secretary, and only in
1980 that he became a full member of the Politburo. Gorbachev
was to trigger a revolution from above which swept away both
mono-organisational socialism and the Soviet Union. But one of
the first to feel the effects of the change was Babrak Karmal.
The two superficially had certain attributes in common. Karmal
was only two years older than Gorbachev, and each had been com-
munists for many years. But the differences between the two were
more significant. Gorbachev, in the words of his adviser Andrei
The Karmal Period, 1979–1986 105